This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art, which may be related to various aspects of the present invention that are described and claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present invention. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
Computer usage has increased dramatically over the past few decades. With the advent of standardized architectures and operating systems, computers have become virtually indispensable for a wide variety of uses from business applications to home computers. In fact, for some businesses, a loss of computer data can result in severe financial penalties for the business (e.g., loss of customers, bad publicity, and so-forth).
For this reason, many businesses now employ data back-up or data protector systems to ensure that a hardware failure (e.g., a broken storage unit) does not result in lost data. One of these back-up systems is known as mirroring. In mirroring, also known as RAID 1, every bit of data is written to two separate and independent storage units. In this way, if one of the devices is damaged, no data is lost because identical data is stored on the “mirror” device. As can be appreciated, however input/output (“I/O”) throughput (e.g., retrieving and storing data) with two separate mirrored storage units can be slower than the I/O throughput with a single storage unit.
Improving the I/O throughput to a mirrored storage system would be desirable.